American Indigenism and Democracy: Churchill, Marshall and Villoro on Assimilation, Pluralism, and Autonomy (Winner of the Hubert Griggs Alexander Award)
American Indigenism and Democracy: Churchill, Marshall and Villoro on Assimilation, Pluralism, and Autonomy (Winner of the Hubert Griggs Alexander Award)
What is an experience of music?
An experience of music can be something as complex as playing an instrument
and composing, or it can be something as simple as just listening to Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony. However, at the point when Beethoven was composing his Ninth
Symphony, he had already spent several years of his life unable to hear certain
sounds and tones. It is estimated that at this point in his life Beethoven had already
suffered from hearing loss for more than twenty years (Davies 42-43).
1 The cause
of Beethoven’s gradual hearing loss and eventual deafness are still debated and not
completely understood.2 Just two years before the first performance of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, during a rehearsal of his work Fidelio in late
November of 1822, friend and musician Anton Schindler accounted to a friend that
“from the beginning of the duet in the first act, it was clear that [Beethoven] heard
nothing of what was going on, on the stage” (MacCarthy 51). During this same
rehearsal, the seventeen-year-old soprano Wilhelmine Schröder recounted of
Beethoven:
At that time the Master’s physical ear already was deaf to all tone. With
confusion on his face, with a more than earthly enthusiasm in his eye,
swinging his baton to and fro with violent motions, he stood in the midst
of the playing musicians and did not hear a single note! (Davies 56)
